Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Fermentedly Challenged and other misc blog stuff

Dave, the author of "Fermentedly Challenged" has commented on my blog a fair amount recently. I appreciate it enough that I feel that I should point out his blog to my other readers. I am not sure doing so will help his blog traffic. Probably not, but I don't think it can hurt either.

"Fermentedly Challenged" is a relatively new addition to the "Blogs I Read" section on the right side of my blog. He is a great source for Colorado-related news. In fact, he gives Colorado Beer News just about every day. That is one of my favorite parts of "Fermentedly Challenged". It is a great place to get Colorado-centric beer information.

He is also a Homebrewer, and we all know home-brewing beer geeks are the best kind of beer geek. I can't imagine a better use of on-line time than reading about home-brewing (unless maybe it is writing about home-brewing), and his home-brew related blog posts are way-better-than-average.

You may have noticed (probably not, but maybe) that lately I've been using the "Insert jump break" feature of blogger. Basically, all that does is put in a "Read More" link anytime you see the blog entry in a list of blogs (such as the main page or any searches). This way, you get a summary of the article that doesn't take up as much room. If you want to read more, you can follow the link. This is especially nice, I think, for those blog entries that have lots of pictures (most of mine do). So far, I have left the most recent post alone. I add the "page jump" to the previous blog entry after I publish a new one.

I can't decide if this is something I want to continue. Let me know if you like this function or not. I would think that my sister would like it a lot since her internet access is dial-up (can you believe it?) and the blog probably seems much faster to her since she doesn't get all the pictures every time she comes to the main page. She has not mentioned liking it, so maybe she doesn't care (or has not noticed).

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SheppyBrew.com has been hit pretty hard by comment spammers lately. I am not sure why. Usually comment spammers include a link in their comment (which SheppyBrew.com will not publish until I review), but over the weekend, a bunch of comments ended up on the site with just weird random subjects and phrases. Since they did not include HTML links, they were just automatically published to the site.

Then, twitterfeed took those comments and tweeted them, so if you follow me on twitter, you saw a bunch of weird tweets from me this weekend.

I changed my twitterfeed so that it doesn't tweet the SheppyBrew comments anymore. It still tweets updates to the pages of the site, but no comments.

This week, I am still getting hit by the comment spammers, but they are all including HTML links and thus not getting published. I am thinking of turning off comments completely for awhile to see if these guys give up. I also may program some sort of simple image CAPTCHA instead. I guess it depends on how much time I allow myself. My implementation of CAPTCHA would probably be so simple that it would never actually fool a comment-bot, but it should be fun to try.

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I figured out why my Contact Me form was not always sending me an email. It has been fixed. If you used this and did not get a response, it was not me being rude. It was because I didn't get the email. This form is shared by this blog and sheppybrew.com and should work better in both places now.

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Do you like the "You might also like" widget on the blog? As I mentioned in "SNB Brewing Blog", I got it from Scott's blog. I've seen it other places recently and think maybe someone copied it from me. I do like it. It is interesting to see what pops up. Quite often they are posts that I had forgotten about.

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August already broke July's "page views" record. This is the 4th month in a row with record-breaking page view numbers. Hurray from Sheppy's Blog. Thanks to all you readers. PLEASE leave comments!

4 comments:

Thanks for the shout out ESheppy. Appreciate it. You were the one who pointed out the LinkWithin feature on your site. I liked it and added that to my blog as well. It's a nice graphical way to point out other articles.

One tip about spam comments, I use Blogger as my platform as well. I turned on Comment Moderation to "Always". It requires that I approve every comment before it gets posted. I don't seem to get many spam comments anymore.

Unfortunately, it's also a deterrent for others to post comments as well. I get far more comments on my Facebook page for the blog instead of the actual blog itself. I think it's a trend as more and more readers use RSS to read blog posts these days and don't actually visit the actual blog as much.

Keep up the good work here. Always enjoy reading what's going on in other parts of Colorado. Cheers!

Oddly enough, I have never had big problems with comment spam on this blog (or any blogger sites) which is why I don't even use the CAPTCHA challenge here.

It is http://sheppybrew.com where I am having the issue. I wrote that sight in my spare time in ASP.net (little by little). Basically, I am Moderating comments with any kind of link, so none are getting posted and the spammers are still trying. I think eventually they will give up. In the meantime, it has just been a pain going through the emails I get letting me know I have a comment to look at.

So, really, I am using this as an excuse to figure out how to program a CAPTCHA challenge in ASP.net. It doesn't look too difficult, I just need to decide to take the time to do it.